Last week at a Citrix internal event, the speaker asked everyone to put all of their devices in the center of the table. The first person to touch their device had to buy lunch for everyone at the table. While this was an exercise in reducing multi-tasking and encouraging focus on the presenters, it was a great testament to “anytime, anywhere, any device” access to information.

While we were all sitting on the West Coast, my table included Citrix employees from as far away as China and offices across the United States like Urbana, Illinois; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; Santa Clara, California and Boston, Massachusetts. The ages ranged from seasoned professionals to mid-career experts and some early in their technology career. Our job roles at Citrix were diverse: design, marketing, test engineer, director of product development, vice-president. Our devices were widely different, both in manufacturer and style. Phones and tablets were pink, blue, grey, purple and even camouflage. What’s interesting is none of us used exactly the same personal device to access our corporate applications and data, but we all had the same personal experience to get to those applications and data through XenDesktop and Citrix Receiver. It didn’t matter how far away we were from our home office – across the country or across the globe – we had fast, secure, mobile access to keep our day jobs going while we were out of the office at an event.

Obviously from the picture I was the first to pick up one of my devices- my smartphone, so I could take this picture. I guess I owe my table lunch.